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This past week, Haitians in Port-au-Prince were already grieving after at least 18 people died in a Carnaval stampede at around 2 a.m. on Feb. 17.

Daniel "Fantom" Darius, the lead singer Barikad Crew, was standing atop a towering Carnaval float when his head struck a high-voltage wire strung across the street, producing an electrical explosion that panicked the tightly packed crowd below. (Ironically, Darius survived.) Some 76 other people were hospitalized with serious injuries, bringing this year's toll of Carnaval wounded to 123, even though the final day's celebration was cancelled and replaced with an official memorial ceremony where the tragedy struck.

Kim Ives is founder of, and contributing editor to, Haiti Liberté, a newspaper with offices in Haiti and New York. The Haitian-born Ives also has more than twenty years experience reporting with the paper, Haiti Progrès, and currently hosts the weekly WBAI New York radio program, 'Haiti: The Struggle Continues.' Ives is too a filmmaker who has collaborated on many films documenting human rights abuses, trade struggles, and conflicts between the island's peasant farmers and corrupt State enterprise. He's contributed to the books: 'Dangerous Crossroads,' 'The Haiti Files,' and Haiti: A Slave Revolution,' and appeared on many international news programs promoting the cause of Haiti's disenfranchised, travelling Canada and the U.S to deliver lectures on the persistently dire situation there.

With a "slow-motion coup" underway in Venezuela, John Pilger is interviewed for Telesur, the Latin American TV network, by Mike Albert.

Mike Albert: Why would the US want Venezuela's government overthrown?

John Pilger: There are straightforward principles and dynamics at work here. Washington wants to get rid of the Venezuelan government because it is independent of US designs for the region and because Venezuela has the greatest proven oil reserves in the world and uses its oil revenue to improve the quality of ordinary lives. Venezuela remains a source of inspiration for social reform in a continent ravaged by an historically rapacious US.

By hero, I mean Farmer has saved hundreds of thousands of Haitian lives over the past 28 years, both personally and through the “social medicine” organization Partners In Health, which he co-founded there.

He’s also been a huge champion of the country’s poor — pointing out repeatedly, in books and articles, how the world’s powers (notably the U.S., Canada and France) and the aid industry have bled the country dry and then blamed it for its weakened state.

Wildrick Guerrier, a refugee from the devastation of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, died in a Haitian jail in 2011, 10 days after the United States revoked his temporary permission to stay in the country and deported him and 26 other men.

THE PUBLIC ARCHIVE: Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on the themes of race and slavery, and nationalism and revolution, in the nineteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic World. Her first book, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, a critical, path-breaking study of the multiracial history of Cuban independence, was awarded the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman historian in any field of history.